"Any other species having been all but wiped out would eventually die. Even if they had the numbers for a genetically stable population, depression and ennui would carry them away.
"The Mad Lemurs of Terra though, they looked it as just one more thing to scream and rave against.
"None of us should have been surprised they returned."- Former Grand Most High Sma'akamo'o, from I Have Ridden the Hasslehoff
Sitting on the armored limousine, Violet Flowers Line Paths to Peace watched as the vehicle left the spaceport. He was looking around at everything, taking in what people were wearing, what they were doing. Vehicles, air traffic, everything.
Any other planet that Violet had been too, the Empire of Kitira would be seen as hyper-aggressive, prone to violence, and a powder keg waiting to happen. The fact that the majority of citizens were armed. There were air defense positions everywhere around the star port, with, from what Violet's limited military knowledge told him, extensive sensor systems and targeting systems.
The road showed waving fields of grain and vegetables. He was surprised to see that the fields were being worked by actual people, in brightly colored clothing, rather than robots.
When he saw the sign, which his contact lens translated for him, it suddenly made sense.
"NAKASERO TRADITIONAL FRESH PRODUCE!" as well as "WHY EAT NUTRIFORGE WHEN YOU CAN EAT TRADITIONAL FOODS?" was hand painted on a wooden sign. There were women in bright clothing carrying baskets of woven fiber filled with vegetables. They would move to very modern vehicles before placing the baskets in the back seat.
They do not have to live such lives, they choose to, he thought.
He had studied the nutriforge, creation engine, and matter forge. It was a Terran invention, from even before they managed to achieve superluminal flight They had managed to crack the riddle of energy to mass, mass to energy, with minimal loss during the transfer. As near as he could tell they managed to achieve matter transmission at roughly the same time.
He nodded as he saw another produce area go by. This time it was healthy trees heavily laden with fruit, with living people tending to it, all in the same types of outfits.
The nutriforge freed billions from the work to eat cycle, yet they have people out working to create food, he thought.
More heavily armed citizens.
None of them seemed too curious about the stingwings flying low and slow, the grav strikers, or the armored convoy. Sure, a few people stared for a moment or two, but the majority seemed to just glance then go back to what they were doing.
The vehicles got on a highway.
Armored convoys appeared to be standard. He saw more than a few go by, all of them with heavy security. Some were labeled, personal, political, or corporate. Others were blank, or just had security services on them.
Even individual vehicles seemed heavily armored and armed.
He remembered the sign from the starport.
"BEYOND THIS POINT, YOU HAVE CONSENTED TO BEING RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR OWN SAFETY"
He had checked.
Earth, Terra, whatever name (He was fond of Tellus), was not a single unified nation that encompassed the planet.
Instead, it was nation states, some of which still competing along esoteric definitions. Some of them were actively at war to the point that there were no less than eleven ongoing conflicts involving military forces.
He had looked. During the fifty years that Terra had been in the Bag, Terra had gone from 123 nation states to 85 back up to 90, down to 87, up to 113, down to 92, and was now at 126 nation states.
Civil wars, absorbing other nations through armed conflict, balkanization, and other means of splitting and combining.
It seemed to be a fairly frequent occurrence on Tallus, for nations to divide, combine, even return from history. There were more than a few nations that were destroyed through warfare or absorbed by their neighbors that then returned.
Violet was glad that he had examined Dreams memoir on her time on Tellus, as well as observations of other leaders
Terrans were adept at conflict, to other observers and their writing it appeared to be a Terran's natural state.
Violet had looked over Tellus history books as his craft had moved in, understanding their history meant everything.
He realized his mistake now.
For the rest of the universe, it was over thirty thousand years, over forty thousand years, since the brutal war between Tellus and a variant Hive of Mantid. He had noted to himself to read up on that conflict as well as communicate with Hive Home diplomatic services to find out exactly what had happened.
Not the official story, but the reality.
He knew how it was easier to let records fade away that contained embarassing facts.
It was never easy to admit that your entire species had been wrong, had been terrible, had been evil.
He knew the shame.
His own people had a dark time, when the original Omniqueen had taken them over after they had found the way to enlightment. How the Omniqueen and her servants had devoured so many of his people's friends. How only a carefully orchestrated rebellion and stellar geometry had allowed them to break free of the Omniqueen.
He carried a slight bit of shame.
Speakers, in antiquity, were powerful psychics, flush with phasic energy. They could control entire planets through their mastery of psychic energy and psychic domination.
That was then.
Over the millions of years his people had changed.
This is now.
No longer could he reach out. No longer could he exert his will over others.
He was truly a Speaker. He spoke for even the smallest of the castes, spoke for the voiceless, spoke in the voice of the Overqueen.
But he could not put his thoughts into the minds of others.
For tens of millions of years, his kind could hear others.
The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.
But they used their voice to speak.
It was an honor to be a Speaker. To use his voice to speak for those who used psychic powers to speak. To be able to arbitrate between peoples who could not hear one another due to psychic wavelengths without invading their mind.
The silence and privacy of one's own mind was paramount.
Eloquence was a gift from the universe to the Speakers of his people.
He turned from his musing, watching the fertile land sweep by as the ship approached the city of Captain Alex's Rest. The skyrakers were lit up, lights twinkling. It looked almost like a fairy tale city. Holograms flickered and danced, making it look like the city was sparkling.
He nodded to himself.
He had dealt with primates before. They could be touchy, but usually they were placid, slow to move, slow to anger. The ones that were not usually never got beyond hunter-gatherer or destroyed themselves, at the latest, in an orgy of atomic hellfire.
Not the Terrans.
He looked down at his datapad, checking the updated information. The files from Smokey Cone and Hivehome had arrived during the ride.
Petabytes of data.
He sighed and looked back out of the window.
There would be complaints lodged by his staff toward Diplomatic Services once he arrived at his lodging. It was an unacceptable oversight that Diplomatic Services had sent him completely unprepared beyond a scant few biographies and documentaries. While others may point at the tens of thousands of years that had gone by, Mantid and Lanaktallan and Treana'ad databases handled millions, tens of millions of years of data without losing it due to file degredation.
True, the Lanaktallan databases had issues with file indexing due to the sheer amount of data they kept, but it should have been easy to get the data Violet had needed.
The city was busy, with a dizzying array of colorful or drab clothing. He saw beings of many different species on the streets.
He idly wondered if skin, hair, or eye color denoted castes to the Terrans.
A quick check showed that in antiquity it had.
Ah, yes, the 'The Other Syndrome', many species suffered under it, he thought, reading some it.
Again, he noted how Terran history was full of impossibilities.
He had been made aware of Terran temporal warfare countermeasures. He had been aware of the fact that the Terrans did not care that it might not be their true history, it was true to them and that was all that mattered.
This is going to be difficult, he thought to himself.
His datapad beeped and Violet looked down at it.
The Diplomatic Corps had decided that his datapad was secure and his security clearances were high enough for a file marked immediate priority to be sent to him.
He read it.
He read it again.
And again.
The file detailed what the actual problem was.
He had been sent due to the fact that the Terrans had been in The Bag for over thirty thousand years local for the rest of the galaxy, but only fifty local for them. That when they had vanished into The Bag, the enemy had been the Lanaktallan and the Atrekna (now extinct), as well as the Unified Council and the Precursor Autonomous War Machines.
Now the enemy was the Mar-gite, whoever was facillitating them, two unknown groups, and a handful of smaller, newer, aggressive and energetic species on the fringes of Confederate Space, usually in the Long Dark.
The real reason for the diplomatic urgency was, well, to put it in layman's terms...
mind blowing.
He had read about the Terran rebirth system, largely considered to be a legend or a myth by most beings. That a dead human could be resurrected via a neural mapping copy within minutes or hours.
Recently, upon leaving The Bag, the TerraSol Gestalt had let it slip that the system to perform neural mapping and impressing for Terrans had been applied to all the other races. That trillions of non-Terran beings were in what was being listed as "AFTERLIFE (SUDS)" and "AFTERLIFE (ACTIVE)", dwelling in some kind of user specific paradise with full interaction.
Several Gestalts, and soon afterwards, governments demanded access to the dead. Many wanted them to solve problems, to give interviews to curious academics, to answer for crimes (real or imagined), to solve manpower shortages.
The TerraSol Gestalt, and the Solarian government refused.
Violet nodded. He agreed with the assessment that what was desired was nothing more than slavery.
He agreed with the meme that showed someone living miserably, dying, and a government worker pulling them out of the grave and putting them back to work in misery. Many of the memes ended with "Not even death is a respite. What do you have to lose?"
He nodded. That was understandable. In some nation-states, the government had become malevolent. The idea that you could not escape, even in death, from state enforced bondage, was horrifying. The ethical implications were staggering.
Violet understood their anger. Not personally, not based on personal experience, but intellectually and through observation.
A being could be brought back again and again to serve 'the needs of the People/State' and their work would never be finished.
It was eternal slavery.
The datacomp beeped and he checked it. His arrival and his image had appeared on social media sites despite the attempt at a blackout. Many Terrans were upset that he was present on Tellus. A few of the memes and postings referred to fighting in the Human-Mantid War. Many of those were aggressive toward his person.
Violet thought about it as the car entered the city itself.
From what he had read on the Sentience Uninterrupted Disaster System, those beings may have been killed during the Human-Mantid War and just recently rebirthed.
Their memories of a war over forty-thousand years ago for him were only years old.
Violet made an annotation on his datapad to give a speech that would state that his Hive had never encountered Terrans before. Terran Descent Primates, yes.
His homeworld and worlds of his nation had millions of Terran Uplifted Primates as citizens. He had grown up knowing, respecting, and having affectionate relations with many of the Primates of the Overqueens.
It would complicate things that the Human-Mantid War was within living memory for millions of the Terrans.
Still, Violet enjoyed a challenge. It was merely a challenge to his overarching goal.
Finding common ground for the returning Solarian Military Directorate and the rest of the Confederacy.
Violet found the outrage that Terrans felt at the idea of the consent of the deceased being revoked for 'Needs' to be perfectly understandable, logical, and a sign of empathy.
The threats of violence were not because they did not see the others as equals.
It was because those equals were attempting to strip away one of the driving motives of the Terrans.
Consent.
Looking through the historical timeline on his dataslate, Violet looked over the times that advanced nations had revoked consent through various machinations.
It always ended in bloodshed.
Well, not entirely. Sometimes it ended at the voting box.
He found it interesting that in the Hamburger Kingdom, a being's consent could be revoked if they were nominated for public office, which was treated more like a punishment than anything else. In The Celestial Kingdom lands consent was guarded by the Emperor, who ensured the rapacious and scheming Lesser Divines could not strip away the consent of the Beloved Ones, which was the name for the common person.
The vehicle slowed, moving through heavily armed checkpoints.
There were already protestors waving signs telling him to leave or die.
That was all right. He had experienced that before.
"We will ensure your security is at high alert at all times," The leader of his personal guard said.
Violet just nodded as the limo moved onto the secure estate grounds. It came to a stop and a Terran military warborg opened the door carefully.
"We have arrive, sir," the warborg stated.
"Indeed," Violet said, climbing out of the limo.
He breathed deep, slowly, as he headed for the diplomatic residence.
He had a lot of work to do.
HAT WEARING AUNTIE
Oops.
--- NOTHING FOLLOWS ---
TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDS
Oops? What's oops?
Define "oops", sis.
--- NOTHING FOLLOWS ---
HAT WEARING AUNTIE
Nothing. It's fine. It'll be fine.
...
...
Probably.
---NOTHING FOLLOWS---
LANAKTALLAN FREE HERD
Not precisely an explanation that inspires confidence. The last 'oops' we had, an entire stellar system exploded.
Define 'oops', if you would.
--- NOTHING FOLLOWS ---
HAT WEARING AUNTIE
It's fine. It's all fine. We're not at war. All good.
We're all good here. We have a-a oops here, uh, now. Give us a few minutes to lock it down. Uh, little oops, not very dangerous.
---NOTHING FOLLOWS---
RIGEL
We're at war on several fronts, what do you mean we-
Wait. Is this about TerraSol? I thought you were sending diplomats to talk to them.
WHAT DID YOU DO?!
---NOTHING FOLLOWS---
HAT WEARING AUNTIE
I did send diplomats! One of our best! You've all met him. He's perfect for the job.
He's one of the best, highly skilled.
It's just... I might have forgotten that he's a Speaker...
--- NOTHING FOLLOWS ---
TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDS
You sent. A speaker. To TerraSol.
A speaker.
To a TerraSol that is already jumpier than a hatchling after six cones.
To a TerraSol that is manifestly angry.
To a TerraSol that has probably invalidated most of our war fighting tech and techniques in the last five decades while they've been in The Bag and we've had a thirty thousand and some odd year head start?
The same ones who wrote "AVENGE US DOT DOC"?
You sent a speaker there?
--- NOTHING FOLLOWS ----
HAT WEARING AUNTIE
Yes. Look, it's fine. He's still alive. We haven't had a second incident. Just... close, is all.
The Terrans calmed down.
So, you know...
Oops.
---NOTHING FOLLOWS ---
RIGEL
Oops indeed.
At least a couple hundred systems aren't burning.
--- NOTHING FOLLOWS---